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Natural Law and Natural Rights Second Edition CLARENDON LAW SERIES Edited by Paul Craig Works of John Finnis available from Oxford University Press Reason in Action Collected Essays: Volume I Intention and Identity Collected Essays: Volume II Human Rights and Common Good Collected Essays: Volume III Philosophy of Law Collected Essays: Volume IV Religion and Public Reasons Collected Essays: Volume V Natural Law and Natural Rights Second Edition Aquinas Moral, Political, and Legal Theory Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism with Joseph Boyle and Germain Grisez NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL RIGHTS Second Edition JOHN FINNIS 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß J.M. Finnis 2011 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Crown copyright material is reproduced under Class Licence Number C01P0000148 with the permission of OPSI and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland First published 2011 (first edition 1980) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe ISBN: 978–0–19–959913–4 ISBN: 978–0–19–959914–1 (Pbk.) 13579108642 PREFACE The core of this book is its second Part. In one long movement of thought, these chapters (III–XII) sketch what the textbook taxonomists would label an ‘ethics’, a ‘political philosophy’, and a ‘philosophy of law’ or ‘jurisprudence’. We may accept the labels, as a scholarly convenience, but not the implication that the ‘dis- ciplines’ they identify are really distinct and can safely be pursued apart. Parts One and Three are, in a sense, outriders. Anyone interested in natural law simply as an ethics may omit Chapter I; anyone whose concerns are limited to jurisprudence may omit Chapter XIII. And those who want to see, in advance, how the whole study yields an understanding very different from the accounts of ‘natural law’ in their textbooks of jurisprudence and philosophy might turn first to Chapter XII, and then perhaps to Chapter II. The book is no more than introductory. Countless relevant matters are merely touched upon or are passed over altogether. Innumerable objections receive no more than the silent tribute of an effort to draft statements that would prove defensible if a defence against objections were explicitly undertaken. No effort is made to give an ordered account of the long history of theorizing about natural law and natural rights. For experience suggests that such accounts lull rather than stimulate an interest in their subject-matter. And indeed, the history of these theories can only be properly understood by one who appreciates the intrinsic problems of human good and practical reasonableness with which the theorists were grappling. So my prior concern is to give my own response to those problems, mentioning other theories only where I think they can both illuminate and be illuminated by the theory presented in this book. My hope is that a re-presentation and development of main elements of the ‘classical’ or ‘mainstream’ theories of natural law, by way of an argument on the merits (as lawyers say), will be found useful by those who want to understand the history of ideas as well vi PREFACE as by those interested in forming or reforming their own view of the merits. Every author has his milieu; this book has roots in a modern tradition that can be labelled ‘analytical jurisprudence’, and my own interest in that tradition antedates the time when I first began to suspect that there might be more to theories of natural law than superstition and darkness. Someone who shared my theory of natural law, but whose focus of interest and competence was, say, sociological jurisprudence or political theory or moral theology, would have written a different book. In 1953 Leo Strauss prefaced his study of natural law with the warning that ‘the issue of natural right presents itself today as a matter of party allegiance. Looking around us, we see two hostile camps, heavily fortified and guarded. One is occupied by the liberals of various descriptions, the other by the Catholic and non-Catholic disciples of Thomas Aquinas’.1 Things have changed during the last 25 years, and the debate need no longer be regarded as so polarized. Still, the issues tackled in this book go to the root of every human effort, commitment, and allegiance, and at the same time are overlaid with a long and continuing history of fierce partisanship. So it may be as well to point out that in this book nothing is asserted or defended by appeal to the authority of any person or body. I do quite frequently refer to Thomas Aquinas, because on any view he occupies a uniquely strategic place in the history of natural law theorizing. Likewise, I refer occasionally to the Roman Catholic Church’s pronouncements on natural law, because that body is perhaps unique in the modern world in claiming to be an authoritative exponent of natural law. But, while there is place for appeal to, and deference to, authority, that place is not in philo- sophical argument about the merits of theories or the right response to practical problems, and so is not in this book. My arguments, then, stand or fall by their own reasonable- ness or otherwise. But that is not to say that there is much that is original in them. My debts to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and other authors in that ‘classical’ tradition are recorded in the 1 Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: 1953), 7. PREFACE vii footnotes and in the more discursive notes following each chapter. My debt to Germain Grisez is similarly acknowledged, but calls for explicit mention here. The ethical theory advanced in Chapters III–V and the theoretical arguments in sections VI.2 and XIII.2 are squarely based on my understanding of his vigorous re-presenta- tion and very substantial development of the classical arguments on these matters. I have, of course, many other debts, particularly to David Alston, David Braine, Michael Detmold, Germain Grisez, H. L. A. Hart, Neil MacCormick, J. L. Mackie, Carlos Nino, and Joseph Raz, who from their diverse standpoints offered comments on the whole or substantial parts of a draft. The book was conceived, begun, and finished in the University of Oxford, whose motto could be placed at the end of Part Three. But the book was mainly written in Africa, in Chancellor College at the University of Malawi, in an environment at once congenial and conducive to contemplation of the problems of justice, law, authority, and rights. March 1979 This page intentionally left blank PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION The text of the first edition, including its footnotes and the endnotes to each chapter, is almost unchanged. Typographical and other formal errors have been corrected, and two or three kinds of locution whose connotations have altered significantly since 1979 have been adjusted. Although everything has been reset, the pagination is the same, within one line per page, up to the point where the Postscript begins, after which there is also an enlarged Index to both the original book and the Postscript. The aim of the Postscript is not to say everything that might well be said if these matters were to be treated afresh. Rather it is to indicate where the original needs, I think, amendment or supple- mentation. The Postscript begins with some general observations, by way of introductory Overview, and then comments on each chapter section by section, in sequence. In the Index, references to pages numbered above 413 are to new material. This new edition was prepared in conjunction with the five volumes of my Collected Essays (hereafter CEJF). References in the Postscript to items republished in those volumes use the form essay II.13 and so forth. Where the original edition cited some- thing republished in CEJF, a supplementary reference in that form has also been inserted. Each of those five volumes contains a substantially complete Bibliography of my publications both before and after Natural Law and Natural Rights. The short Bibli- ography of Cited Essays, after the Postscript, locates each of the works of mine cited in the Postscript, whether or not republished in CJEF. The editor of the Clarendon Law Series kindly allowed me to use a cover picture in the style of the Collected Essays. Like the picture for CEJF I, but not the other volumes, this is an oil painting.Donein1891byEdwardWhite,itiscalledWhite x PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Saltbush, and depicts results of human purpose and action, to ‘subdue the earth’, in vast areas of marginal land in South Aus- tralia that are neither as near-desert as Lake Torrens (CEJF V) nor as hospitable and fertile as Adelaide (CEJF III and IV) or the Barossa Valley (CEJF II).
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